use it. My brother didn’t like me being in his room. So every time I wanted to use the computer, I had to turn into a covert-ops agent and sneak my way into his room without anyone noticing. When I heard him coming, I quickly hid in his closet or behind the door.
This kind of taboo behavior around the computer only piqued my interest more. When I finally got my own computer in junior high school, it was like discovering Pandora’s Box. It was the old computer that my brother was using before he won a laptop from a raffle. But, it didn’t matter to me that it was old and slow. I wanted to learn everything I could about the machine, and the internet was my guide to everything.
I created my very first website in the 7 th grade. All of the other websites looked pretty bad back then with their animated flaming gifs, Times New Roman black font and blue under-lined links. People didn’t know how to code websites back then, so they all used website templates or “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) HTML editors. A WYSIWYG HTML editor basically hides all of the website coding and lets you create websites by simply dragging and dropping the elements you want onto the WYSIWYG editor. I wanted full control over the codes of my websites, so I learned how to code a whole website by hand without using a WYSIWYG editor. To this day, I still don’t use WYSIWYG editors much. Just using a basic text-editor was good enough for me.
High School
Throughout my school years, I had trouble taking English tests. Since my memory wasn’t that great, I had trouble memorizing vocabulary words. English was also my second language, and people only spoke Chinese in my house. Also my parents didn’t buy me any English books, and the nearest library was too far from my house. Thus, all of these disadvantages meant that I wasn’t very good at taking any English exams.
When I took the NYC high school entrance exam, which tested middle school students on Math and English, I had only been accepted to the second best high school in New York City, Bronx High School of Science. I was only one correct answer away from being accepted into Stuyvesant High School, the #1 high school in NYC. Because of my financial disadvantage and high exam score, the New York City Board of Education offered to allow me attend Stuyvesant High School if I attended a summer school. I opted out, because I did not want to be one of the dumbest students in that school.
By choosing to go to Bronx Science, I was among the top students going there. My 96% GPA was among the top student GPA’s of the school and it could have been higher if I didn’t get distracted during my senior year there. Although I did not get to be valedictorian or salutatorian, they did give me a school award that had a large college scholarship attached to it. Only one student per year won that award. For my financial background, having the extra cash to pay for college was a better award than being valedictorian.
By having less competition and challenge in high school, I had more free time to learn other things. After I had mastered HTML during my freshmen year, I moved onto learning Flash. Back then, all of the cool websites had Flash in it. It’s a bit archaic now to have Flash on your website, but it was the fad of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The ability to add more interactivity to your website that normal HTML and JavaScript couldn’t do was what fascinated me the most. This fascination ultimately led me to develop apps, where good interactivity was one of the main selling points.
During my junior year, my high school started offering C++ classes. It was a very basic class that taught me the fundamentals of programming. It was in that class that I found out that I had a talent for programming. I learned C++ at a much faster pace than everyone else did. While my memory skills were not excellent, my logic, critical thinking, creativity and mathematical skills made up for it. All
This kind of taboo behavior around the computer only piqued my interest more. When I finally got my own computer in junior high school, it was like discovering Pandora’s Box. It was the old computer that my brother was using before he won a laptop from a raffle. But, it didn’t matter to me that it was old and slow. I wanted to learn everything I could about the machine, and the internet was my guide to everything.
I created my very first website in the 7 th grade. All of the other websites looked pretty bad back then with their animated flaming gifs, Times New Roman black font and blue under-lined links. People didn’t know how to code websites back then, so they all used website templates or “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) HTML editors. A WYSIWYG HTML editor basically hides all of the website coding and lets you create websites by simply dragging and dropping the elements you want onto the WYSIWYG editor. I wanted full control over the codes of my websites, so I learned how to code a whole website by hand without using a WYSIWYG editor. To this day, I still don’t use WYSIWYG editors much. Just using a basic text-editor was good enough for me.
High School
Throughout my school years, I had trouble taking English tests. Since my memory wasn’t that great, I had trouble memorizing vocabulary words. English was also my second language, and people only spoke Chinese in my house. Also my parents didn’t buy me any English books, and the nearest library was too far from my house. Thus, all of these disadvantages meant that I wasn’t very good at taking any English exams.
When I took the NYC high school entrance exam, which tested middle school students on Math and English, I had only been accepted to the second best high school in New York City, Bronx High School of Science. I was only one correct answer away from being accepted into Stuyvesant High School, the #1 high school in NYC. Because of my financial disadvantage and high exam score, the New York City Board of Education offered to allow me attend Stuyvesant High School if I attended a summer school. I opted out, because I did not want to be one of the dumbest students in that school.
By choosing to go to Bronx Science, I was among the top students going there. My 96% GPA was among the top student GPA’s of the school and it could have been higher if I didn’t get distracted during my senior year there. Although I did not get to be valedictorian or salutatorian, they did give me a school award that had a large college scholarship attached to it. Only one student per year won that award. For my financial background, having the extra cash to pay for college was a better award than being valedictorian.
By having less competition and challenge in high school, I had more free time to learn other things. After I had mastered HTML during my freshmen year, I moved onto learning Flash. Back then, all of the cool websites had Flash in it. It’s a bit archaic now to have Flash on your website, but it was the fad of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The ability to add more interactivity to your website that normal HTML and JavaScript couldn’t do was what fascinated me the most. This fascination ultimately led me to develop apps, where good interactivity was one of the main selling points.
During my junior year, my high school started offering C++ classes. It was a very basic class that taught me the fundamentals of programming. It was in that class that I found out that I had a talent for programming. I learned C++ at a much faster pace than everyone else did. While my memory skills were not excellent, my logic, critical thinking, creativity and mathematical skills made up for it. All
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